Global Freight Tracking API: Track 30+ Air & Sea Carriers — One Call, One Standard Response

Freight forwarding companies need to track shipments across dozens of airlines and shipping lines — each with a completely different tracking interface. Some carriers have clean JSON APIs. Others render tracking data with JavaScript after several redirects. Others are behind Cloudflare with reCAPTCHA or audio CAPTCHA challenges. A few use internal SOAP/XML formats. There was no single system that could query all of them and return standardised tracking data without human intervention.

We built the freight tracker as a Flask REST API with a dedicated scraper module per carrier, each using the right tool for that carrier's specific protection level. Simple carriers are handled with direct aiohttp/requests JSON calls with browser-spoofing headers. The freight.aero gateway handles 15+ airlines via a single POST with the IATA carrier code — with 2captcha integration for reCAPTCHA-protected variants. Playwright with headless Firefox and Webshare rotating proxies handles JS-rendered pages (FedEx, Saudia Cargo), extracting multi-stage tracking event tables after waiting for Angular/React app rendering. For CMA CGM — which combines JS rendering and audio CAPTCHA — we built a full automated bypass: Playwright detects the CAPTCHA iframe, clicks the audio challenge button, captures the MP3 audio URL, submits it to AssemblyAI's transcription API, polls for completion, extracts the digit string from the transcript, and types each digit into the CAPTCHA input. The entire flow completes without human involvement. HMM sea freight required iframe navigation and extraction of six distinct data tables in a single session. Swiss World Cargo required Selenium Wire for proxy-level traffic interception to capture session tokens before making bid requests.

Flask microservice API (threaded, port 5000). API key authentication. Playwright (headless Firefox) with Webshare rotating proxy pool. Selenium Wire + Undetected ChromeDriver for Cloudflare-protected carriers. aiohttp async HTTP scraping. BeautifulSoup + lxml XPath parsing. 2captcha API for reCAPTCHA v2/v3 solving. AssemblyAI audio CAPTCHA transcription bypass. scraping.narf.ai JS rendering proxy for Hapag-Lloyd. CrawlBase fallback scraper. Fake user agent rotation.